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http://www.trust.org/item/20150319111240-etns3/?source=fiOtherNews2
Direct Link to Full 65-Page 2015 Guide:
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Guide Aims to Help Donors Push Climate & Disaster Funds to Women
A Typhoon Haiyan survivor puts finishing touches to a mat in
a house in
Basey, Eastern Samar, in Central Philippines – November 6,
2014
By
Amantha Perera
– 19 March 2015
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (Thomson Reuters Foundation)
– Women, who regularly suffer more fatalities than men during disasters, still
lack adequate safety measures despite growing awareness of the dangers they
face, experts warn.
“I think the big thinkers and the governments
are aware of the dangers, but what they don’t seem to know is what needs to be
done to reverse the trend,” Emilienne De Leon Aulina, the executive director of
the Mexico-based International Network of Women’s Funds (INWF) said in a
telephone interview.
Terry Odendahl executive director and CEO of
Global Greengrants Fund (GGF), a U.S.-based non-governmental organisation that
specialises in small grants of up to $5,000 for environmental projects, said
that situation was clear during last December’s U.N. climate negotiations in
Peru.
“There was a lot of rhetoric, but when it came
to effective action on gender issues, there was back-sliding,” she said.
To help change that, the GGF, INWF and Alliance
of Funds have launched a research guide
that aims to help donors effectively fund gender-sensitive projects.
“Most funders lack adequate programs or systems
to support grassroots women and their climate change solutions. Men receive far
greater resources for climate-related initiatives because they tend to wage
larger-scale, more public efforts, whereas women’s advocacy is typically
locally based and less visible, making it more difficult for funders to find
and support,” the guide said.
It noted that only 0.01 percent of all global
grants address climate change and women’s rights together.
Aleta Baun, an Indonesian activist, said that
before she began a grassroots organisation in her native island of West Timor
in 1996, all the assistance programmes were developed after consultation with
village men – not women.
Now in Asia, however, the Global Greengrants
Fund is working with the South Asia Women’s Fund to identify areas where women
need assistance in dealing with climate change in India and Nepal.
Urgent Action Fund, a global women’s rights
group, also is looking at funding a project in South America to identify where
environmental and women’s issues overlap.
SMALLER PROGRAMMES MORE EFFECTIVE
Odendahl said the Global Greengrants Fund had
also been talking with large international funders such as the World Bank and
the Green Climate Fund in an effort to prepare more programmes aimed at women.
“We don’t have specific targets, but what we
have told these groups is that smaller grants, smaller programmes are more
effective in reaching women,” Odendahl said.
Both she and Aulina stressed the need for
economic empowerment of women. In many cases, women find themselves left out of
decision made about land they live on and use, while “men have a large say over
these decisions,” Aulina said. The same is true for how profits from land are
used.
Aulina said that if women had a larger share in
the money earned from their land, their voices within and outside the community
would become stronger.
She also said that governments were still slow
to understand these dynamics. “We have to keep building awareness, keep
building momentum so that decision makers understand the true situation,”
Odendahl said.
The new report says programmes addressing
women’s issue and environmental issues have historically operated in separate
spheres, making collaboration rare.
One key area for progress is building linkages
in the private sector, Aulina said.
“We see more and more corporations now taking serious note of
environmental issues. We have to use that attention to build knowledge on how
much of a disproportionate risk women carry” and to build gender sensitivity
into programmes, she said.